Novel Approach: Kent Hudson

Three years ago, Kent Hudson
gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference on how the industry could
theoretically strengthen player-driven storylines. This week, he’s returning to
San Francisco with an indie game that proves how it can be done.

A former developer on
projects including BioShock 2, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, Thief:
Deadly Shadows, and Deus Ex: Invisible War, Hudson quit the AAA
space shortly after his 2011 talk and began work on The Novelist, a game
that bypasses the trappings of shoot ‘em up thrillers in favor of a
family-centric narrative. Released in December, the game focuses on the challenges
of balancing career, marriage, and family and has garnered significant press
praise for its relatable themes and nuanced plot. Story and characters lie at
the center of The Novelist, as does a desire to maximize the interactive
possibilities gaming offers. After getting nominated as a finalist for the
Gamer’s Voice Award at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival, The
Novelist heads to this year’s Game Developers Conference, running from
March 17 through the 21st.

Get In Media: Where did the concept for this game come from?

Kent Hudson: I had gotten dissatisfied with the fact that a lot of
video games were telling really linear stories where every player, no matter
what you do in the game, was going to get the exact same story. We were copying
Hollywood and doing these elaborate cut scenes and spending all this money on
these linear stories. What’s unique about games is that we have a player. They’re
interactive. The player should be able to be involved in the story. That’s a
special thing to our medium and we, more and more, were just copying other
mediums and trying to rip them off instead of doing something that was unique
to what’s special about our medium.

… I pulled up an old pitch
I had worked on where you’re a ghost in a house with six or eight people in the
house. I started working on that version of the game and it was just too big.
It was too nebulous and there was no emotion attached to it. It was more like a
toy. It was more like The Sims than it was anything that was going to
create a story. By process of elimination, I started shrinking that game down
into what eventually became The Novelist. I got it down to three
characters, which is basically the smallest number of characters whom are still
interesting to interact with, and I changed it to be a family because that
provides such a strong context. I didn’t have to explain a bunch of backstory.
People kind of inherently know what’s a good marriage and a bad marriage and
what’s a good father and a bad father. … If I put it into that recognizable
context, then I could dive right into the story stuff without really having to
do a lot of set up.

GIM: The game has a very specific narrative structure. How
did you create that?

KH: The backbone of the game is the relationships of the
three characters. In every chapter you’re making decisions that are either good
for Dan’s career or good for the marriage or good for him being a good dad.
From a narrative perspective, I wanted to make a game that asks you the same
question, which is about your career versus family and what’s important. I
wanted to ask that in nine different ways, so to have nine chapters that each
had different scenarios to ask that question. It’s not that hard to have a game
that asks you to make these decisions, but the challenge was how do I have
those decisions turn themselves into an actual discernible story?

… In any chapter you’ll
find a ghostly journal that has the characters’ reaction to the previous
decision. If you read their thoughts, you’ll see those thoughts change over the
course of the game as those relationships get better and worse. When you finish
each act of the game, you get a separate wrap-up that tells you sort of at a
macro level where those relationships are moving. … The real challenge was
just you have to write all of the possible outcomes. So for all the chapters I
had to write out this worked out for Tommy, this didn’t work out for Tommy.
This worked out for Linda, this didn’t work out for Linda. Then there are a
bunch of edge cases. If the player is really, really focusing on the
relationship and the marriage and getting things really good between Dan and
Linda, but ignoring Tommy, the son, and it gets to the point where Tommy’s
relationship with his dad is really bad, it starts to not ring true if Linda,
the mom and the wife, is sitting there saying, “Oh, my God. We’re so in
love right now. This is the best man in the world.” She can’t be saying
that about a guy who’s neglecting his kid. She needs to stick up for him. The
same thing with Tommy. If he’s got the best dad in the world, but the parent’s
marriage is on the rocks, he’s not going to be like, “Daddy, I love you so
much.” [He’s going to be like] “Why are you hurting mommy’s
feelings?” I had to start looking at sort of the edges of where the player
could push those relationships and making sure the characters reacted to that.

GIM: Did you have a specific system for staying organized
when developing the narrative?

KH: In a lot of games, you write a story, pick where the
player needs to make decisions, pick where the choice points are, and you write
a bunch of small linear stories that, at times, will branch, but mostly
everyone gets the same story in the same direction. I wanted to try a different
story structure with this game, so one of the things I did up front was put a
rule on myself that every time you play the game, the chapters are going to
come in a random order. When I’m working on the game, I don’t know if in the
chapter with the art show, I don’t know if that’s going to be the second
chapter. I don’t know if it’s going to be the seventh chapter. I don’t know
what choices the player will have previously made. I don’t know what status the
relationships are in when that chapter comes up. I had to write every single
chapter as a stand-alone thing. … That constraint I put on myself is to keep
the game fresh and force myself to stick to this weird dynamic structure and
resist the urge of writing a traditional linear narrative.

… I use a tool called Scrivener. It’s a really
great writing tool. It’s not really intended for games. … It’s used for
writers of novels and screenplays and things like that, but it’s a really great
organizational tool. I had a little bundle for each stand-alone chapter and had
a template that I used for here’s Dan and Linda’s journals, here are the
journals they would write if they did get their way, if they don’t get their
way, those special cases I talked about. Here’s the text for getting their way
or not as a chapter wrap-up scene and little cut scenes at the end that kind of
describe the events.

GIM: Story-centric games like The Novelist and Gone
Home have done well in the indie space. When are we going to see games
like this appear in AAA?

KH: It’s almost impossible to say because the motivations
in AAA are so different. … The good thing about indie games is that since the
scale is so much smaller we can take these risks and be successful on a scale
that AAA games just doesn’t care about. I’m one guy and I had some contributors
who helped out with the game and I contracted the artwork, but I don’t have to
sell 3 million copies of my game for this to be a profitable and
life-sustaining exercise. I can make these games on a much smaller scale
because, the fact of the matter is, the subject matter of this game and the
weird narrative risks that I took, frankly, just alienates a large part of the
core gaming audience. It’s not the people who really love Call of Duty
and who just bought Titanfall and Dark Souls and these hardcore,
big AAA games that just came out. They don’t want a quiet, small game about
family life and difficult decisions.

I worked in AAA for 10 years.
I’ve seen this at four different companies. When you’ve got a publicly traded
company, they are looking for the maximum profit. They are looking at stock
price. That’s why you see so many sequels and so many repeats and so many
cloning games. They’ve got CEOs who half the time don’t even play games and are
answering to shareholders and trying to maximize shareholder value. They’re
always looking for what’s the hot trend, what’s the biggest bang for buck, what
game has the chance to explode on the market and make, hopefully, that GTA-level
of billions of dollars? No publisher is going to look at The Novelist or
Gone Home and go, “Wow, we can sell 7 million copies of that”
because the audience they’re going after just doesn’t want it. … It’s almost
a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the people who make those decisions don’t
think that will work, they never get a chance to work.

GIM: How do you ensure that you’re reaching that smaller
audience who are interested in this type of game?

KH: When I announced my game and when I announced the
release date, I started going to websites and looking for the contact
information or asking my friends if they had any contact information for
[gaming] sites and just, one by one, started writing emails. It’s a lot of
grassroots stuff. Make sure you have a website. Make sure there’s a trailer
that’s on the website so people can know what the game is if they find their
way there. I tried to reach out to sites that aren’t as gaming focused.
Obviously, if I reach out to Kotaku or Polygon, the audience
there is going to be 100 percent gamers. That’s not where the 45-year-old
person who’s never played a game but might be interested in my subject matter,
that’s not where I’m going to find them. I did do some outreach to other sites.
My game has been written up on The Huffington Post, The LA Times,
got a mention in the New York Times and places like that that are not
traditional gaming outlets.

GIM: For new developers who want to make narrative-driven
games, what do you recommend they do?

KH: The best advice I can give [is] get it on the screen
as fast as you can and let people play it and take the feedback. In the first
versions of the game, the writing was atrocious. It was very, very bad and I am
fortunate enough to have friends who are very, very good writers who are also
comfortable giving me very critical feedback. Just writing a bad version of
something and getting it to people and having them tell you why it’s bad so you
can make it better each time. That’s ultimately how I got to where the game is.

Don’t have characters talk
openly about how they feel. Don’t have them say, “I’m sad.” Describe
an event where the player can infer that they’re sad or talk about events or
talk about interactions between people that illustrate the way they’re feeling
towards each other instead of having them just say, “I’m so mad at Dan
right now.” Have them talk about an argument they had at dinner that
illustrates it in a different way.

Leave some white space for
the audience to fill in. If you hint at one thing with one character and then
you hint at the same event from a different angle from a different character
but don’t explicitly say exactly what happened, put enough there that the
player starts to draw connections. That can be really powerful because then the
player really feels like they’re part of that narrative experience. They feel
like they’re filling it in for themselves and making connections. It draws them
in and makes them pay attention and makes them more of an active participant as
opposed to just sitting back and having everything explained to them.

The 2014 Game Developers
Conference kicks off in San Francisco March 17th through 21st. Get In Media
will have the latest from the front lines.